The Poker Project (playing and writing about poker in the U.S.)

may our recpro dreams never die. Whereabouts do you play Johnny?

Thanks for the rec Dubn, I do indeed enjoy scifi and will give Fallout a try. And lemme toss a scifi rec your way, now that I'm far enough into Season One of

https://variety.com/2022/tv/reviews/pantheon-amc-plus-william-hurt-tv-review-1235355807/

Variety

Animated Drama ‘Pantheon’ Brings Sci-Fi Nightmare to Vivid Life: TV Review

An enjoyable dumpster fire, for sure. I was around the first weekend of the Heater and everyone was chirping about Cody firing 36 bullets. Am not in any position to speculate whether he and his stable are cheating, but guilty or innocent, they're doing a pretty shitty PR job.

This week the co-founders of GCP (who marketed the event) and I should be recording our next podast, and we're planning to discuss the brouhaha in some detail. I'll poast the convo here once it's available.

What are your thoughts?

by bob_124 k

Bob's Best of 2024

Favorite Book: This was one ez, Claire Keegan's

https://groveatlantic.com/book/small-things-like-these/

Grove Atlantic

Small Things Like These | Grove Atlantic

(not from 2024, but new to me)

Was given a copy of this book today. Feeling some readerly pressure, so decided to steer away from any reviews.

great to hear, Dr. Lemme know your thoughts.

It's been a while since I've gone off to read an author's whole oeuvre on the strength of one book, but that's where I'm at with Keegan (admittedly ez since she only has 4-5 short works). I read and enjoyed Foster and am waiting for her first short story collection, Antarctica, to arrive from the library.

A Weekend at the Heater

The billboards start ten miles away, relentless and suggestive, beckoning drivers to Try Your Luck and Join the Fun. Not that I need convincing. As I ease off I-10 and head to the waterfront, one last sign greets me at the exit:

Welcome to Biloxi: We Have a Great Deal to Offer

I pull into the Beau Rivage's garage and park, as usual, on the third floor facing west, so I can admire the late-afternoon sun as it dips over the shimmering Gulf. I grab my hoodie, leave my backpack, and take the elevator to the main floor. It’s the first Friday in January, the opening weekend of the Million Dollar Heater, and the hotel lobby is still in full holiday swing. Guests are strolling past a huge Nutcracker, posing in front a polar bear steering a festive sled pulled by yipping huskies, and pining for a red-bowtied red sports car nestled amidst Christmas trees flecked with artificial snow. Boulder-sized ornaments glint with natural light that twinkles through the towering glass ceiling. Compared to Harrahdise’s carnival kitsch, the Beau is all elegance.

I pass the buffet on the left, clear security, and head down a spacious walkway that’s something out of a Bond casino flick. Hanging from the ceiling are eight silver chandeliers festooned with golden candles, flanked by table games on the left—three card poker, Ultimate Texas hold ‘em, Blackjack Match, Mississippi Stud, Crazy Four Poker—and, on the right, more Single Deck Blackjack. Then there's roulette, the small ball whirring around the wheel until it settles into one of the numbered grooves, some craps tables, and finally, between the main cashier’s cage and Snacks, a 24/7 fast-food joint, the cardroom.

Welp 40 on the 1/3 list, I text Buddha. At least a dozen would-be players are milling around, their eyes impatiently ping-ponging from their phones to the Bravo waitlist on a flatscreen. It’s a little after four in the afternoon, and I’m arriving at least an hour or two ahead of him.

That’s what I was afraid of, stupid faculty meeting, he replies. I assume all tables are running?

I step inside and take a look. All that’s left from Memphis Q, the barbeque restaurant that the cardroom replaced, is its bright brick walls. On the top section is the registration podium, a small cashier’s cage, and five cardtables: green baize, brown rails, surrounded by brown reclining chairs; ten more tables are on the lower level. I nod at Jefe, Kwong, Minraise, Minh, and a few other Nola regs who are here for the South's biggest annual donkament series, put my name on the $1/$3 list, update Buddha (full room, nine $1/$3s going), retrace my steps beneath the chandeliers, and hang a right between the buffet and an acre of slots. Here, on this narrower walkway, it’s very smoky and very loud. Along with the incessant pings and plinks and beeps that you’ll hear on The Price is Right are the less frequent sounds of special rewards—a shrieking eagle, stampeding Buffalo hooves, cha-CHING cha-CHING cha CHING, smashing gongs that almost—almost—muffle the chorus of Queen’s “I Need Somebody to Love” piped in from the ceiling. I hold my breath until I clear the slots and reach a long escalator that takes me to the second-floor lobby. It’s quieter up here. A few dozen players are waiting to register for the first flight of the first donkament, a $360 reentry that'll probably get north of 2,000 entries.

Like a moth to light, I follow the soft sound of chip-chirps into the Magnolia Ballroom. There are lots of tables, sixty or so, most of them filled with would-be donkament binkers. The Professor’s here, smiling as usual with a glass of what looks like pink lemonade and chatting with three other backpack grinders. Don the Bookie’s here, with his drooping mustache and tattoo above his beefy left wrist, wandering slowly around like a curious walrus. The King of Louisiana poker’s here, white-haired and paunchy, scanning the handful of overflow cash games with an annoyed expression. By the entrance, Gene D and Chuck are powwowing in matching backpacks and ball caps and cargo shorts. Tough to imagine a place with more middle-aged men dressed like middle-schoolers.

Back down the escalator, through the smoky slots, beneath the chandeliers. The $1/$3 list is moving quickly, and around five I’m sent to a table in the lower section and take the 7 Seat with my usual stack, three red, two green. As soon as Dealer Han pitches me cards I’m more comfortable, more driven by immediate purpose, even though I’m supposedly here to write, to capture this experience, whatever that means.

I check my phone and see a text from Buddha, asking how the list’s moving. I tell him he’ll be fine. They have cash tables upstairs too, I add.

My table, as expected, is filled with recs. Raise to ten, call, the button squeezes to $40, and the big blind, a southerner with a leathery face that matches his shirt, cold calls. He donks out for $100 on Three-Five-Seven one club and calls off the rest when the button shoves. The turn and river are whatever, the button shows two Aces, the big blind slowly shows 24cc for a backdoor flush. “I play so bad,” he says. “Didn’t even realize I have a flush.” I don’t know whether to believe him or not.

The button, come to think of it, looks like Buddha: late thirties, Irish-pale, bald except for a little peach fuzz, scruffy reddish beard. He mutters to himself and trudges to the cage for a $200 reload.

“I play so bad,” the big blind says again, almost proudly. “You play upstairs, and you get stuck so bad, then you come down here and play bad to get it back.”

“Sometimes it works,” a firefighter with a hipster mustache says.

From my seat I have a clear view of the entrance. In walks a youngish white guy wearing an Aria hat, instantly I’m reminded of a hand we played in another casino, during another donkament series. I don’t know his name or anything about him. Floorman Kyle’s manning the P.A., summoning players and filling seats, the waitlists are still long but he handles it well, just another day at the office. A bald middle-aged white guy arrives, Kyle sends him to our table, the guy’s wearing a blue tee-shirt with a pair of boxing gloves and the words, EVERYTHING IS EARNED.

One table away, Mike G’s standing behind Jenny, his poker wife. He’s looking dapper as usual in a black short sleeved shirt. I go over and say hi, he gives my arm a squeeze and asks me if I’m getting taller, tells me he’s been running bad the last eight weeks. “Just ran a set of Queens into a set of Aces,” he says, nodding over at his $2/$5.

“No fun,” I say.

Taking the open seat on my left is a friendly woman wearing a brown winter cap. She has an ease about her, a practiced casualness of someone who spends a lot of time in cardrooms. As I’m firing out texts to get donkament updates, I glance at her phone and see that our convos mirror each other. Table 36, her pal says. Let me know when you’re ready for a break.

Aight, she replies.

I ask if she fired a bullet, she sighs and says, “Might try again tomorrow. But it’s hard to stay patient. After a while, Queen-Jack suited starts looking pretty good.”

“It does.”

She doubles through Seat 9, the firefighter, who’d flopped a straight with 25o and lost to her higher straight. “Nice hand, baby,” he says, politely tapping the table as the $900 pot is pushed her way. She politely taps the table and he adds, “Well, that one hurt. But that’s what you get for playing ****.”

Five minutes later, apparently still lost in thought, he says “ouch,” and takes a walk.

Around six Mike and Jenny stroll away, drinks in hand. The woman on my left whose name, according to her rewards card, is Charity, tells me she’s from Panama City. I ask if she plays at Ebro, and she tells me she can’t—she deals there. Her ease at the table makes more sense now.

Where are you? Buddha texts around 7:30.

Lower part of room by wall. Table six.

A few minutes later he's scanning the room by the podium, wearing a dark blue button-down with rolled-up black shirtcuffs and a mobster hat tilted rakishly atop his peach fuzz. I wave, he ambles over, we shake hands—always a handshake, never a fistbump. “Gotta watch the door,” he says, handing me a room key. “Doesn’t close all the way on its own.”

We briefly swap updates—medphys, Buddha’s boss, still has a stack in the reentry—then Buddha heads upstairs to check on the overflow cash tables. As he’s leaving a rolly-polly guy with a scraggly neckbeard comes over and chats with Charity, and I instantly recognize him as an Ebro reg who’d stacked me with trips after I flopped a straight flush draw. I don’t know his name or anything about him.

After running his stack up to almost $1,500, the firefighter’s back on a nub. “I need to go eat something,” he says, getting up. “I’m stuck in Groundhog Day right now with all this ****in’ repetitive motion.”

I check my phone. It's getting late. I’m planning to fire two bullets in the reentry tomorrow. One more hour.

I play until 11:30 and call it a night (6ish hours, down $190). Once more beneath the chandeliers. The playing floor is crammed with gamblers. Eight 75, the Beau’s cocktail lounge, is hopping. On the way up to my car to grab my backpack, I squeeze into the elevator beside a pack of southern ladies dressed to the nines, all skirts and handbags, and one of them launches into a story about how, only a few minutes ago at Eight 75, an eighty-year-old guy leaned in and licked her long black hair. Her girlfriends burst into laughter, their eyes merrily scanning my face and the other solo dude's for a reaction. I smile and keep quiet. “Had to get him some,” the other guy says pleasantly as he exits onto the second floor.

A Weekend at the Heater: Saturday

I’m up around nine and head outside for a short run. It’s a crisp cloudy morning, and once I'm past the Hard Rock a mile-long stretch of sandy beach opens up to a lovely view of the Gulf: placid water, drifting boats, coasting gulls. I jog to The Blind Tiger, retrace my steps, and treat myself to a café au lait at The Roasted Bean. On the way back to my room, just outside the buffet, I spot Kwong slumped against the railing. He’s always exuded casual confidence, but now he looks pale and panicked. “Can’t get in,” he tells me, nodding at security. Turns out he’d been playing for twenty hours straight, went up to his room to grab some cash, and when security carded him—a fresh-faced twentysomething—he came up empty.

“I’ll check the poker room,” I tell him.

Two minutes and I'm at the podium, asking Supervisor Missy if anyone found a driver’s license. She shakes her head. When I get back, Kwong’s waiting for me with a sheepish, relieved look on his face.

His ID was in his pocket the whole time.

“There’s some rungood to start your day,” I say. He smiles, and we briefly catch up. We aren’t close, but I know that he’s been grinding full time for about a year. In the rare moments when our schedules overlap—early evenings in a Nola $1/$3 game, when he’s just getting in and I’m on my way out—he’s struck me as a tough player with endboss potential. But that’s in the NL streets; these days he’s been exploring the dark side. Transitioning from hold ‘em to PLO, he tells me, is like going from Cantonese to Mandarin, or from the guitar to the violin: many of the principles are the same, but mistakes are inevitable. Although it’s frustrating to learn a new game after devoting so much time to a single poker variant, lots of whales are migrating to PLO, and his responsibility is to follow the money.

“Thanks again. Good luck in the reentry,” he says as we part ways.

When I get upstairs, our room is still shrouded in darkness. I pad over to my bed and try to keep quiet, not that it matters. Buddha’s hearing aids are on the counter and he's lightly snoring, still dead to the world. I shower, get dressed, double-check that my registration slip is in my wallet, and head to the Magnolia Room. People are milling around, looking for seats, swiping phones, and, in the middle of the room, pointing and hooting and laughing. Dressed in a white button-down and dark blue jeans, Salesman Charlie’s triumphantly grinning with his arm around Trucker Kenny, who’s dressed in drag: long lavender dress, pearl necklace, dark violet stockings, black slip-ons, and a blond wig that matches his Hulk Hogan mustache. He’s smiling sheepishly, and I remember the prop bet they’d been chirping about for months: Kenny, an Arkansas fan, had bet Charlie, an LSU fan, on the outcome of the annual football game. Back in November LSU kicked the pants off Arkansas 38-10, and now Kenny’s paying the price.

“Free pictures! Come one, come all!” Charlie says, with a throaty cackle.

I find my seat and examine my starting stack—black 100s, purple 500s, pumpkin 1Ks, turquoise 5Ks. Although I’ve visited the Beau countless times, usually on road trips from Houston to New York, this is the first donkament I’ve played here. I scan the room, table after table of tight-jawed competitors, all of us wearing our kick-ass faces, so much striving and straining in one room. By the end of the weekend, someone will be posing for a winner’s photos with all of these chips stacked high, with a trophy and a six-figure haul.

It won’t be me—at least not on this bullet. I bust around two and pony up another $345 for the 5 p.m. flight, knowing that if I don’t buy in now I won’t later. One of the things I hate the most about donkaments is how you can’t plan your day: you might be playing for an hour or for ten, it’s impossible to know. Now I’ve got three hours to kill. For a while I wander aimlessly through the smoky slots, past a high-limit section that used to be the old cardroom. Cash played back then. I'm eventually pulled as if by tractor beam to the new room. Waiting beside the cage is a Nola reg who also just busted out, we fist bump, I ask if he’s around all weekend, he shakes his head and says with a wry smile, “I’m burned out.”

Buddha’s in the lower section, dressed less flamboyantly than yesterday in a green Notre Dame hoodie and a backwards LSU cap. He leaves his stack at the table and joins me for a quick bite at Snacks. “How’d it go?” he asks as we take a two-seater by the restaurant.

“Card dead, then I lost a flip,” I say, popping open a Caesar salad. “How’s your session?”

“Quiet so far.” He takes a sip of Coke. “But last night was crazy. Guy showed up around one. He was a big guy, very talkative, very loud, big personality, every hand he was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s gamble.’ Had a wad in his pocket. Every hand he was making it $15 preflop—every hand. Most of the time on the flop, he would also bet $15. And then if he had anything at all, or if he just felt like bluffing, he’d jam the river for two, three hundred or whatever.”

After a decade of friendship, I can’t begin to guess how many hands we’ve given each other. Buddha specializes in veiled bad beat stories, but you can never quite tell what you'll get. “So he just liked to bluff,” I say neutrally.

“Yeah. And it got so insane that the guy to my left, who had $2K in front of him, was calling him down with Queen-high. It was just insanity.” He takes another sip. “So what happened to me—I started with three, was up to $365 or so, and I had Jack-Nine suited. I’m sure I called a $15 raise because every raise was $15, and the flop came Jack-Nine-Four, rainbow. What’s the best way to play a guy like that? He’s sitting two to my left. Just check-call him all the way down?”

It sounds like we're having a strat chat, which is fine by me. "Seems like a good adjustment," I say.

“So I checked, he bet his usual $15 dollars and got a few calls. Now I don’t wanna just check-call, let somebody hit a Queen-Ten draw or something like that, so I raised to $75. He called. Turn was a blank—didn’t make a straight, didn’t pair the board, I don’t remember what it was.” He chuckles. “So I just jammed.”

“For like $300?”

“Something like that. He was also a loose caller. So I jammed, he called, he had Jack-Queen. The river was another Jack, so I doubled up there. And then—my stack was up to $750 give or take and I was almost leaving, I’d been losing the last few days and I was like like, “Eh, I’m up four or five hundred bucks, and this guy’s insane’…” He laughs and says, “then I was UTG and looked down at pocket Kings. I was like, ‘oh, ****.’ ‘Cause I knew it’s gonna be a big pot. So what do you do here? You know he’s raising to $15. Do you open to $15? $30? Limp?”

“I wouldn’t have a raising range. I would limp everything and I would mix in limp-calls and limp-reraises.”

“I did limp. And this is where it gets interesting. The guy in between us limped, he made it $15, call call call. So now what do you do? You have to limp/reraise, right?”

I nodded.

“The question here is how much. ‘Cause if i reraise small—what i consider small here is $60, $75—if he calls, I’m still likely to get callers. Because the table at this point is reasonably deep, there’s people that have over a K.”

“I’d size up, for sure. I was thinking $100. But you’re deep and likely to get called by worse, so juicing it up makes sense. I would probably make it $100 straight.“

“I went a little higher than that,” Buddha says with a grin. “I made it $275.”

“Why?”

“Mainly because I really didn’t want to play the pot at this point. I know that’s a bad way to think about it, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want three callers.”

“This is getting into the metagame,” I say, rooting through my salad to segregate the croutons from the good stuff. “You play poker to get called by worse hands. If you make it $275, you probably won’t get called by many worse hands that often. So you probably shouldn’t even be playing, but that’s more of a mental game thing.”

“That’s what I’m saying—I didn’t really want to play a $1,500 pot. I was going to get up for that reason. So I made it $275, he jammed. I obviously called. Flop comes Deuce-Deuce-Deuce. Turn is a Nine, and the river is”— “he laughs and shakes his head, “a fourth Deuce.”

“No way!”

“Yes. The guy stood up and said, ‘I guess we’re chopping,’ and I almost threw up. I though he had like Ace-rag, Ace-Jack.” We’re both chuckling.

“He probably didn’t read the board correctly.”

“No, he didn’t. He had pocket Queens. After that hand I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m not sitting at this table with $1,500 in front of me. I’m not having him go all-in preflop so my Aces get cracked with Six-Five when he makes two pair for a $6K pot.”

We walk back to his table, I mill around the room a bit, nod at Kwong who's in PLO, nod at Morgan who's in $1/$3, and eventually make my way upstairs for bullet number two. I’m seated a few tables away from the overflow cash game section, with a clear view of a jumboscreen with the Chief-Texans pregame show. “I dealt sixteen hours yesterday. Might deal twenty today,” Dealer John says once we get going. He’s young, affable, chatty. Like most of the others up here, he's probably an itinerant dealer who works donkament stops around the country. I ask how many tables are up here. “Sixty-five,” he tells me. "They’re all ten handed, so that’s 650 players. And we only have 70 dealers.”

“Hence the twenty hour shifts,” I say.

“65 here, fifteen downstairs. They could definitely use more if it keeps growing.” He nods at the white-haired floorman who's scrawling names on a whiteboard in green magic marker. “Just look at those lists. A lot of games on those lists.”

Scattered beneath the tables are empty plastic water bottles, shredded peanut M&M wrappers, soiled napkins, empty racks, trampled popcorn. Floorman TJ, a white guy with thinning blond hair and a frizzy farmer’s beard, is scurrying off to fill chip requests, ushering players to their seats, giving dealers a fill. He drops off five stacks of red, one stack of whites, and ten greens at a nearby table. “Any particular way I should arrange these?” the dealer asks him.

“Keep the $25s as close to your heart as possible,” he says. She does as she’s told, arranging them in the front-middle of her rack.

Our next dealer, Irina, is ballerina-graceful and sarcastic. She has black hair, silver earrings, and meticulously decorated fingernails: they're all painted pink except for her thumbs, which are painted white with a tiny black spade and club, on one nail, and a tiny red diamond and heart, on the other. “I’ve been up for sixteen hours,” she says. “I wake up at 6 a.m. Will I survive?” She looks behind her and asks why she isn’t getting pushed. And it’s true, it’s ten past six and no one to relieve her.

This time it takes me two hours to bust. I descend the escalator into the smoky slots, remembering with crystal clarity why I don’t play donkaments, and yet here I am again. It's only seven, and don't know what to do. I don't feel like waiting an hour to play cash. Don’t feel like eating at Snacks. I pull up Maps on my phone. Suddenly the McDonalds across the street is looking pretty good.

I always called NL the Dark Side cuz I transitioned from Limit.

Gsothere'saDarkerDarkSide?whoa.G

I think you could easily argue that Limit is the true Dark Side.

How many hours of LOLimit have you played? I think I've logged a few hundred

A Weekend at the Heater: Sunday

I’m in line at Snacks with another Caesar salad, swiping away. 16 hrs of tournament play and I get AA once (cracked), QQ once, 55 and 66, medphys texts me and Buddha. 1 hr of cash yesterday and I get KK 2x, QQ and 99. Is that statistically possible? Should I go buy a powerball ticket?

Yes and yes! I reply.

I feel a tap behind me, it’s a dark-haired woman from Nola whose name I don’t remember, we hug, talk how we’re both taking it easy today, I mention that I don’t like the stress and long days of donkaments, she nods, tells me her husband and son are upstairs. I turn to pay and she offers me a $12 donkament comp, I ask her if she’s sure, she says she’s not using it, I thank her and we wish each other luck.

As I'm heading upstairs, a guy passes me on the down escalator already lighting up a cig before he reaches the smoking area. “You still in the first one?” he asks a third guy in front of me.

“Firing the second one.”

“Nice, good luck.”

Outside Magnolia, players are waiting for the Day 2 restart at 1pm, or Event #2, a $235 hold 'em at two. The white couches and all of the chairs lining the walls are full. A few players are sitting on the ground, backs against the wall. Near a snack station in the corner Prissy’s downing the last of a diet Coke. She's wearing big black boots, blacks tights, a baggy pink shirt, glasses, tousled strawberry hair.

“What’s it looking like?” I say, just to say something. She tells me she's waiting for the 2 p.m., and her husband Jerry still has a stack in the re-entry. A white guy in his fifties comes over, hugs Prissy, she asks if he’s firing the second one. "I got lucky,” he says, quietly and proudly. “Bagged.”

“Oh, you did?” Prissy says.

“How’s your stack?” I ask, and introduce myself.

“152. Below average, but…”

“Sending you rungood today.”

“You too.” I wave him off and tell him I’m just a cash game player.

"I couldn’t get anything going yesterday," Prissy says. "And then this chick comes to the table with a chip on her shoulder, and starts bitching at everybody. Somebody would tell her something, and she’d snap back. It’s no fun playing like that."

We nod in agreement.

"And she ended up busting. She called two all-ins—she called one big all-in with Six-three. Why the hell you calling with Six-Three? Then another one she called with Queen-Six. Really?”
As she talks, her eyes are following the streams of players coming up the escalator. “I see Morgan and BJ. Morgan had a lot of chips."

“Run it up!” she calls out to someone as I'm heading inside.

Of the starting field, a few hundred are left, unbagging their chips and dumping them onto the felt, on the flatscreens the remaining payouts are on infinite scroll: $593 for a mincash, $7,576 for reaching the final table, $42,165 for third, $50,400 for second, $82,879 for first—a nice meaty score off a $345 buy-in. Among the two hundredish survivors, I recognize Choff, Steve, Jamie, Hiep, BJ, Dave, Warren, Captain Chop, Peace, Sley, Morgan, Dr. Dom, Destin, Jerry, Ashly, Joe the Pro, plenty of others whose names I forgot or don't know. For a while I bop around the ballroom, catching up with folks and chatting about this and that. Playing? I text Buddha.

Yeah up 175 after first hand I got dealt haha

Nice! A gift?

Pretty much. I raised to 15 UTG with AK off, 4 callers. A42 rainbow flop. I bet 40, sb calls. Turn is a 3 she shoves for like 75 or 80 with A9

I scan the tables, with no clear of idea of how fast or slow the structure is at this point, but there are a lot of rapid-fire bustouts. Jerry, Morgan, Jamie, Chop—all of them take their payout slips to the cage to collect their near-mincashes. Around three the donkament goes on break and I bump into Frank, a community health CEO who seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of poker. “Miracle hand,” he tells me. His eyes have the glazed look of someone who’s amped up on coffee and dopamine. “Guy raises, I go all in, guy behind me goes all in. The first raiser thinks and turns over Ace-Queen and folds. I have Ace-Queen, he has Ace-King. Queen river." He takes a deep breath, apparently reliving the moment, and says, "That was just...sick."

“You got 300?” I ask.

“No. I was at 265 and I just went through a couple sets of blinds, so I’m down to 185.”

“Keep me updated,” I say, and we fist-bump farewell. Near the exit Wild Bill tells me about his end-of-the-year ************ prop bet that’s hanging in the balance.

“Weight loss bet?" Steve says, joining us. “He won’t lose. I can tell you how this story ends." Steve’s laughing, yukking it up, he’s got chirping chips, as they say.

As action gets back underway, I take an opportunity to chill for a few on the plush white couch in the lobby. The salad didn't do the trick, I'm getting hungry again, I pull out my phone and spot another text from Buddha. Just went bust AA vs KK.

Ugh. You done? Gonna grab food soon

Where?

Here or could stop somewhere on way out of town

I'm going to play for a little more.

I send a thumbs-up and tell him we’ll catch up in Nola in a few weeks.

Yep. Will be fun

I pop back inside Magnolia and catch Steve in a hand. A younghead had raised from UTG and got two callers, now action’s on Steve on the button. He’s hatless in silver-rimmed glasses and a gray teeshirt, shuffling a stack of turquoise 5Ks and skeptically eyeing the younghead. “I may not be in first place,” he tells the table, “but I know I’m not in last.” He goes all in and the younghead snaps him off. The two others fold, and it’s pocket Kings against Steve’s Ace-King for a massive pot. Steve’s antsy, he’s out of his seat, he gives me a whadda-ya-gonna-do shrug as the dealer spreads a flop.

It comes with an Ace.

The turn and the river are clean, the younghead rolls his eyes and leaves his seat. As Steve’s dragging in the chips, Darrell gets moved to the table. Thanks to a promise he made his wife—that he wouldn't play a hand of poker until his youngest son's fifth birthday—this is his first action outside the dealer's box in five years. “The game just changed,” Steve says, jabbing a finger at Darrell’s stack. “I want all those chips.”

“You done,” Darrell says, with a big grin on his face.

“I’ve been waiting two years for this. And I have position on you!”

“You still done!”

On this day, the poker gods don't scheme up any epic confrontation between them. Their good-natured banter is apparently enough. Short-stacked and needing to gamble, Darrell busts with King-Jack to King-Queen and is out in 83rd place for $1,318. He taps the table and leaves with his characteristic wide-eyed smile.

Steve, on the other hand, is vacuuming up chips. An hour or so passes, which I fritter away pleasantly with Bill and Jefe on the rail. Forty players left, the prospect of big money is becoming real now, and Steve’s at a table with another big stack, a twentysomething east-Asian guy with a receding hairline and a blue bandanna. He opens to 35K, Steve reraises to 100K. “I’m happy to take the pot down now but I’d prefer if you call,” Steve says.

Mr. Bandanna does call, the flop’s Seven-Four-Deuce, they get the money in, it’s Steve’s Aces against Five-Six. Close to a million chip pot.

“Double me up, Dealer!” Steve screams. He’s hovering over the table, peering intently at the board.

The dealer burns and turns. Jack of clubs.

“Hold!” Jefe says from the rail.

The river’s a Seven. Steve slams his hands together and stalks over to the wall, legs spread wide, hands on hips, triumphant.

“What an *******,” someone says.

“You gotta give this old man a break, Steve says as he retakes his seat. “It’s tough on my heart!”

I'm on the rail for another hour so and check my phone. 8:30, with no telling how late into the night this could go. I decide to call it a night and make the drive home. "Keep me updated," I tell Bill and Jefe.

I looked up my records.

2/4: 1,354 hours
3/6: 250 hours
4/8: 466 hours
6/12: 14 hours

So 2,084 hours of low stakes Limit, lol @ me, ldo.

Records state my last Limit session was in 2016 (IIRC, I sat at a 4/8 Limit table at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas before getting on the 1/2 NL table). Before that it was 7 short sessions in 2014 (a local room that has long gone defunct had a Limit game that I sat in while waiting for the NL game). Other than that, all hours put in 2010-... including a memorable 4/8 Limit hand in Harrah's New Orleans where I missed the $100K BBJ at our table during the Winter Olympics thanks to getting a Lucky Dog during the hand.

I don't really regret taking my sweet time moving to NL. Obviously the low stakes Limit games were barely beatable, but they gave me good table experience in general before moving on to where you could actually win (and lose) some real money.

GcluelessLimitnoobG

Wild stuff. You've got me crushed--I'm only at 353 with little chance to add to that tally, since straight LOLimit no longer runs at Harrahdise.

I remember that BBJ story! It's somewhere itt.

A Weekend at the Heater: Monday

I’m groggy and wiped, as I usually am after a donkament series, despite not playing much, and it takes me a moment to realize that I’m back home in St. Roch. My room is small and square and filled almost entirely with a queen-sized bed. Two windows, no desk, bare walls, except for a framed painting of a guy canoeing down a flooded street past stranded people in colorful shotgun homes, titled “The City that Care Forgot.”

My first thought is of Steve. I open the blinds and turn on my phone and wait for my texts to load. A selfie pops up of Bill and Steve and Jefe at some bar, probably Eight 75, sporting beers and grins. In front of Steve are four bricks of cash: Third place for 42 gees. I feel regret for not being there and vicarious pride. For most of last year he’d been knocking on the door, running up a decent stack in the WSOP Main before punting it off, 15th in a Circuit Main in Indiana, a few four-figure scores, and now this: a good and proper bink.

I quietly open my door and peer down the hallway. My housemates are thirtysomething white transplants toiling in the gig economy—film guy, barback, tattoo artist—united only by a need for beer and cheap rent. No signs of life. I grab a quick shower, get dressed, catch up on some more texts. I got down over 700 but ground it out to leave only down 90, Buddha tells me.

I send a thumbs-up and tell him about Steve. when i left he was one of the chip leaders, they played till 4 am

wow, nice take

I grab my laptop and head into the kitchen. On the island near the fridge are four Lonestar empties and half-eaten Rally’s takeout. The living room is filled with camping gear piled behind a frumpy black couch (on which Foxy, a brown chihuahua mix, happily naps), a movie projector, Simpsons memorabilia, and a huge papier-mâché bust of Richard Nixon. Pretty much everything is the film guy’s, a Houstonian with greasy brown hair and sensitive, sad eyes. He’s usually either passed out or scrambling madly around the house to walk Foxy and finish his other chores before zooming off to work—at the moment he’s in charge of booking sports cars for Jack Reacher 2.

I whip up some coffee and head outside. Our wide second-floor porch, which we share with our next-door neighbors, has a grill and three camping chairs, perfect for watching the park, the cemetery, and the beautiful live oaks on St. Roch Avenue.

And for writing. I start a fresh Google doc and start a task that’s a few weeks overdue: reviewing last year’s results, and plotting out the year ahead.

First, poker. According to my tracking app, I logged 603 hours without setting a concrete volume goal; I more or less played when I wanted to play. My average session length is, as a result, a laughable four hours per sesh. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to share Steve’s zealous enthusiasm or Kwong’s obsessive commitment—all grinding all the time—but the truth is that I don’t like playing that much. At the same time, I don’t want to be a sideline reporter. If I don’t play, then I won’t meet people or see weird **** or collect the stories that will allow me to write an interesting book. This year I decide to shoot for a nice round target: 1000 hours of live poker, supplemented by study and some online play, and a longer average session length. Longer sessions will hopefully make it easier to play in flow and to habituate myself to the long stretches of dead time where nothing much happens.

Next, writing. On the surface, I’d had a successful year: dozens of articles published, tens of thousands of words written. But those stats mask my cluelessness. I feel like the solitary settler at the beginning of Civilization, armed with only a shovel and surrounded by darkness. Sure, maybe I've built a city or two and dispatched a few militia to explore, but I'm still mostly lost.

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My gaze strays from my laptop to the neutral ground, and I feel a familiar pang of hopelessness. I haven’t escaped red chip hell. I’ve barely visited Limitland. Aside from two misfired bullets in the Heater’s reentry, I haven’t played—let alone cashed—a single live donkament. My life, both inside and outside the cardroom, is marked by a consistent inability to explain myself, to say what I'm trying to say. Whenever I mention to friends and acquaintances that I'm writing about poker, I invite the usual questions. Do I play, too? How much do I win? (which is really, of course, a polite way of asking: how much do you lose?) One evening I was out with my girlfriend and two of her friends, a pair of married lawyers, when one of them asked me, frowning, “So what do you actually do all day?” My elevator pitch—that I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before, to tell the story of a cardroom and its players—sounded vague and quixotic, exactly the kind of pipe dream you might hear at the St. Roch Tavern. I'm trying to narrate a story of my life, but I don’t know who I am or what roles I should play.

I close my laptop and finish my coffee. I resolve to finish my resolutions soon, after I go for a run.

I've often wondered if those guys involved in the hand still play in your room. It's been 15 years and my memory sucks, but IIRC:

- the guy that won the big end got it paid out at the table while saying "my wife is never going to find out about this", lol

- the ~35 year old grinder in the red hoodie who won the small end seemed every bit as miserable after winning it as he did before winning it

- the fun jovial young black guy by the name of Tyrone I think, I had played with him a couple nights in a row, and I believe it was his first week of playing poker; he got all of us to sign his ballcap

- Memphis Charles was dealt out of the hand as he was on a smoke break, a real smooth talker who lobbied hard to have both of us paid

Gwouldbeinterestingtoknowifanyofthemarestillplaying/aliveG

Was impressed by Small Things Like These. Pitch perfect, as well an effective moral tale (appropriate historical end-frame). Not a novel, though, which isn't a slight. Also read So Late in the Day, which I thought seamlessly constructed (with a convincing male perspective).

Was thinking you could call your novel "Red Chip Hell" but then thought you'd get asked too many quasi-theological questions about what that means. The sequel of course could be "Green Chip Heaven" or "Black Chip Paradise" (depending on how you good you run while moving from a minor to a major publisher).

Speaking of poker books, Miikka Antonnen did quite well (financially) with the sale of his trilogy (I don't think the 3rd volume is out yet...). He does have a knack on promoting himself though, but I feel will do alright with his book

Man, IDK what Miikka did, but he's really ashamed of it. Every time he gets to that part of the story, he stops. Saw it in threads, in interviews and in the heavily hyped part three where he'd finally come clean.

Would love to see faces attached to those names. None of them are familiar to me. Aside from the 35 year-old misreg: there's one at every table!

Glad you enjoyed it, Dr. I've been on a pleasant digression for the last week, reading two very good memoirs, but I'm returning to Keegan soon, once Antarctica comes through at the library. I'm ideally planning to read her collections in order, so saving So Late in the Day for last--that said, I've already read one story from it and agree that the male perspective works well. Damn impressive, given that she writes Foster from the POV of a young girl.

Lest I get ahead of myself and rashly print money on the publication of my forthcoming novel, I feel obligated to mention that (alas!) I can't take credit for "red chip hell": that's a DGAF neologism, unless he borrowed it from someone else, too. #Sessions4Life

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Not surprised to hear, Dubn. We corresponded a while back when he was publishing his second installment, and it seems like he's done a good job of transitioning out of poker while also completing some cool pokerdocs.

Any idea if he's planning to release his third volume?

Yikes.

The people NEED to know!

are we talking about chuck bass?

cliffs?

No idea. We don't really communicate outside of years ago on this forum and your odd time on FB.

Really!?! Ok, I always had a cynical read of the situation where I identified him as having an incredible knack for promoting himself/creating cliff hangers/suspense for the material to come, like he once did with his famous 2 + 2 blog like ended as abruptly as can be...

it's definitely a testament to Mikka's writing that we're still talking about his adventures and hoping for a third installment.

Seems unlikely we'll get it, but I'd guess we aren't drawing dead

A Weekend at the Heater, and Beyond

The next month passes in a pleasant sort of chaotic rhythm. I go to Dat’s sister’s Chewbacchus house party, as soon as you walk in you can feel the walls throbbing from the cramped crowd of costumed revelers jamming out to a metal band, eventually we spill out onto the street where the red glare of Hank’s Seafood spotlights the intergalactic krewes tramping along St. Claude, the Wookies and the Wonder Women and all the rest, it’s really something. At the end of the night, when the magic is beginning to fade, we can rest easy, knowing that the next parade is only days or hours away.

The following Sunday I go to medphys’s Super Bowl party. He’s a friendly white guy around fifty, burly and balding, curious and generous, always biting off as much of life as he can chew. His new Metairie lakehouse is more of a compound—his brother-in-law’s whole family has been living in one wing for a while—outfitted with a pool in the back and a ping-pong table in the three-car garage and an elevator that ascends to a movie theater the size of a small apartment—full kitchen, plush wraparound couches in front of a big projector on which large men dressed in orange and blue repeatedly tackle each other. Buddha and medphys and I segregate ourselves by the snacks, dressed ironically in a Saints jersey, a Vikings jersey, and an orange Five-Star basketball teeshirt (because lol football), chatting conspiratorially about some hand medphys gloriously botched: trying to see a cheap flop with trash, limping in and calling a raise, reaching the turn with third pair and facing a big bet, and after he narrates his way to the moment of crisis he’ll look at Buddha—who introduced him to poker a few years back—and then at me, who he thinks knows something because I occasionally use the word “range,” and I’ll shrug and say something like, I don’t think I’d put myself in that spot. And then medphys will shake his head and look at me like, you’re not getting off that easy, and remind me that this isn’t poker, this is Quantum Leap and I'm trapped in the body of a terrible poker player: now what?

One Friday evening, as the Knights of Babylon and Chaos and Muses are rolling, I check the temperature at Harrahdise. It’s a little busier than usual, fifteen tables, some regs, some tourists, some regs disguised as tourists. I play through a dealer change or two and start racking up. “Where ya goin?” Tough Guy Tommy growls. He’s wearing a black beanie and a Happy **** Clown Club hoodie wrapped around a black tracksuit. The parades, I tell him. Gotta collect those beads. “Bring something back for me,” he says.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It’s a ten-minute walk through light drizzle to St. Charles Avenue. Hordes of bead-drenched tourists are everywhere—no costumes, just street clothes and gold-green-purple polos and SOTALLY TOBER tees—jostling for space behind crowd-control barriers, beers and phones in their upraised hands as they shout-beg for treasure. One savvy Black woman has a fifteen-foot long pole with a little claw on the end, for fishing. As the floats rumble by I stand behind the scrum, hyperconscious of my too-tallness, raising my arms to my shoulders and twiddling my fingers like the legs of an overturned beetle and trying to make eye contact with the masked riders. Something sails through the air and skids across the damp street beneath my feet, it’s a glowing flesh-colored cock, I scoop it up.

“You’re welcome,” I tell Tommy a few minutes later. I place the glowing cock atop his massive stack, and head back outside.

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Even when I steer clear of the casino, poker threads its way into my daily life. I spot Miss Joan examining tomatoes at Whole Foods. El Chapo, eating lunch with his daughter at Satsuma. Bob the drummer, ordering a burger at Cafe Envie. Wild Bill calls these bump-ins Fight Club moments: when double lives collide. Most of the time there’s brief confusion followed by a smile and a knowing nod: two cardplayers meeting in the wild. But sometimes, even in a city of vice, gambling is a forbidden subject. Once, on a sunny January afternoon, I was on the phone with my dad outside the Avenue Cafe. Watching me intently through the glass was Young Frank. After I hung up, he said something to the woman beside him and hurried outside. “Don’t mention to my wife that I play poker,” he said, leading me around the corner. “She’d kill me.”

There was the Rouse’s cashier who told me that he hated gambling, but it was too precious to give up. Sitting beside friends whose eyes brightened when he was around, he didn’t feel defined by his cerebral palsy. He fit in. The cardroom felt to him like an extension of the city’s warm hospitality. He loved the Quarter, the dancing, the drinking, the masquerade, having fun, nothing matters, no judgment. That was the best part: freedom from society’s pity and judgment.

Our Fight Club moment happened one night on the Northshore, when I walked into a restaurant with a group of friends as his group was leaving. Seeing me, he abruptly dropped his eyes and hurried outside. I think I understand: My face reminded him of the casino. I was a vector for his shame.

By mid-February the parades are over but the daily rhythm of street life, of cardroom life, continues. I bike into the Marigny and work out of my holy trinity of coffee shops—Flora’s, Orange Couch, Fair Grinds—as well as my co-working space in Central City, which by now has an impressive community library (despite an oddly large GAMBLING section). On Sunday mornings, when I’m tinkering with words on the porch, the barback will trudge up the steps with a Budweiser tallboy, soused and exhausted from the vampire shift on Frenchmen Street, and lament the fact that he never has time to write. Washboard Lissa wanders along the neutral ground with a go-cup in her bony hand, telling anyone in earshot that she has throat cancer. There’s old Joey Mcnab, too, always asking if there’s work to be done, sweeping the floors, taking out the trash, anything. One day I spot my old housemate Floyd walking past, looking thin and tripped-out. He’d been promoted to a shift manager at Blaze Pizza and landed his landlord, Rain, a job, so he’s both Rain’s tenant and his boss. That seems appropriate.

It’s strangely comforting to see my neighbors going about their business, just as it’s comforting to see Tough Guy Tommy in his black tracksuit, giving the other regs ****, hunched over his chip-mountain like Smaug the Terrible. The rational part of my brain knows that any of us could be gone at any moment, one day I'll show up and Joey or Tommy will be gone, no announcement, no warning, just gone: finally fallen through society's cracks. But they keep showing up, and it seems to me that the act of showing up is a ****-you to fate, it's their way of saying, I’m still here. I’m still alive.

I know these days won't last forever, but I'm also sure that they'll never end.

Lol'ed at running into poker players in the outside world.

I remember running into a long time reg (who I actually sat beside my last session out) about a decade ago, in a lineup with my wife at Tim Horton's. It's like, um, do I introduce this guy to my wife or is that weird? Like any other person I'd run into it obviously normal ("hey wife, this is Ken, he's on my hockey team!") but a guy I gambol with at the poker table seemed... odd. I remember it being an awkward couple of minutes.

I also don't want to give too much away just in case they're always on the sly when they're playing poker. I ran into the friendly whale at the pub once, sitting there with no doubt his wife, and our eyes lock, and I just feign huh-you-look-familiar, but he then makes the card dealing motion with his hands which gives me the ok to say "oh yeah, Francois right? Howya doin?".

GourendlessnumbereddaysG

He told me - now this was quite a few years ago... - that he had (just about) completed all 3 volumes simultaneously and all that was missing was final touches... Which is also why I always figured that he was playing the cliff hanger card...

Such a shame one has to be "a vector of shame". I'd whisper "there's a pp", whenever I was out and about with my partner, trying not to make eye contact. I wish it weren't the case but suspect it always will be: is poker part of society or what?

What was absolutely different about grinding in little ole Dawson City for so many years (population of 2k) as opposed to say Montreal or Vancouver - or any other city for that matter -, is that it would be impossible not to cross paths with the poker regs all over town : at the grocery store, at the bars, restaurants etc. So you actually got to know them personally, on and off the felt. And at times to find out about personal details that you wish you didn't know... like how the maniac had to ban himself for 5 years from the casino because, in his words, "he had hurt his family too much with his gambling activities"...

But for the most part, I just got to know them better. Appreciate them for who they are. Their grumpiness. Ticks. Lies. Same (boring) jokes over the years.

For the most part, I must admit, I ended up (naturally and inadvertently) befriending those that were the winners in the game. With albeit some donators as well. But the question that always stuck with me was : "why do the decade old donators keep coming back to get punished?"